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Category: General

I’ve been a Windows user for many many years. And I’ve never really had an issue with Windows itself, I find that my work had lead me to have an appreciation for open source tools and Linux as a platform on more than just the server. And over the past year or two, I find that I just don’t game all that much any more. So today I decided to remove Windows, reformat my drives and install Linux as my primary daily driver. This time it feels much more than just a temporary experiment and might actually stick.

I’ve messed with different distributions and have typically bounced between Ubuntu, Debian, and MX. But today I decide to give Linux Mint a run and have opted for the Cinnamon desktop environment for the first time. In the past my preference has been XFCE because I always found it easy to tweak to my liking. Cinnamon isn’t much different in appearances to my eye. Finding and setting themes is quick and painless and it seems the amount of time I would need to spend maintaining the system should be minimal (crossing my fingers on that one). Some basic software I’ve installed is Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Chrome, Dropbox, and Datagrip (for my money, one of the best database clients out there, but always looking for a free quality alternative). I do most of my “programming” in Python and wrangled data that feeds internal databases or automates manual workloads. Getting pipenv was short and sweet and works great (VS Code’s integration with pipenv is amazing).

Hardware for this is my home built machine. Here are the bits and pieces:

Two monitors: a 34″ Dell running at 3440 x 1440 and a Dell 27″ running at 2560 x 1440

Since I work in a Windows world, some remnant of Windows had to be installed. So I decided to install Virtual Box with a Windows 10 client. I can run that and VPN into our company network from that system. I also installed VMWare’s Horizon View client to access one of my virtual machines on the network as well. I’m interesting in installing OpenVPN client software on the system as well, but honestly, OpenVPN support on Linux is pretty lame for the moment. I’m going to wait that one out.

My only complaint right now has nothing to do with the software, but more of an issue with the video card. The card is noisy as hell. I’m seriously considering putting this system up for sale and finding a near silent system to take it’s place on the desk.

From this point out, I guess I plan on documenting anything I might find interesting about Linux, python, anything else I might find worthy of documenting. Most of it will be pretty basic, but it will serve as a place for me to dig up step-by-step information on topics that I’m sure I’ll need to revisit on occasion.